Douthat argues that people use political correctness to shut
down free expression because the strategy works. Instead of debating the merits
of an argument, leftists have shunned and shamed those who disagree, making it
far too costly for the average individual to reject the party line.

In Douthat’s words:

If you
look at the place where the left has won arguably its biggest
political-cultural victory lately, the debate over same-sex marriage, you can
see an obvious example of this dynamic playing out. In the recent examples of
ideological policing around the marriage debate, particularly the
high-profile case of Brendan Eich, we aren’t watching a cloistered circular
firing squad whose actions are alienating most Americans; we’re watching, well,
a largely victorious social movement move to consolidate its gains. Was there a
time, in a more divided and socially conservative America, when the P.C.-ish
pressure on Mozilla to ease Eich out, and other flashpoints like it, would have
backfired against gay activists? No doubt. Do we live in a world now where making an example of a
few executives and florists and blue-state
colleges is likely to lead to backlash against the cause of same-sex
marriage? I very much doubt it; it seems to that the cause has enough cultural
momentum behind it that using taboos to marginalize its few remaining critics
is likely to, well, work.

And
homosexuality and same-sex marriage really are cases where what once seemed
like hothouse ideas and assumptions — an expansive definition of homophobia, a
dismissal of traditional arguments as sheer bigotry — first took hold college
campuses and then won over the entirety of elite culture. The mood and norms
and taboos around these issues that predominated when I attended a certain
prominent Ivy League college back in the early 2000s are the moods and norms
that now predominate just about everywhere that counts. So even if they’re
mistaken about how to apply the lessons of their victory, I think it’s very
natural for left-wing activists, on campus and off, to see that trajectory as a
model for how other cultural victories might be won.

If your goal is to produce groupthink, the strategy works.
Or better, it keeps all opposing arguments out of the marketplace of ideas.
This does not, of course, mean that the ideas disappear, or that the people who
are pronouncing themselves in favor of same-sex marriage really believe what
they are saying.

They have simply learned to keep their views to themselves.

Douthat suggests that political correct zealots got their
idea from society’s general rejection of anyone who mouths anti-Semitic or
white supremacist thoughts.

If it worked there, it ought to work for other causes:

The
reason some on the left look to our present taboos around anti-Semitic and
white supremacist speech as models for how other issues around race and
religion and sex and identity should (or shouldn’t, more aptly) be debated is
precisely because those taboos really are powerful, really do work. Not always and everywhere,
sometimes they backfire and encourage people to act out and rebel … but mostly
they create very strong incentives to tread very carefully around anything that
might be construed as a racist or anti-Semitic foray or idea.

As it happens, anti-Semitism is far from dead. In fact, it
is undergoing something of a revival, for the most part by Muslims
and those on the radical left.

Douthat should also have mentioned that the thought police
are practicing pogroms, the better to rid society of cultural products that
they consider to be alien to their values.

Finally, he observes astutely that people who shut down
opposing points of view are absolutely convinced of the correctness of their
position.

So if
you feel absolutely certain that you have a similar justice on your side on
other issues, if your primary mission is to ensure that your definition of
“expanded freedom” triumphs, why wouldn’t you use the levers of coercion
available to you? If you know that your opponents are in error, and that their
errors are at least on the same continuum with the errors of segregationists,
why would you want to give them oxygen and space?

This form of ideological zealotry contradicts the basic
premise of scientific inquiry, namely that all scientific truths are subject to
doubt. It also contradicts the basic premise of the marketplace of ideas: namely
that no one holds a monopoly on the truth.

Douthat makes the case for doubt:

The
strongest answer, as I’ve
tried to suggest before in debates about pluralism, has to rest in
doubt as well as confidence: In a sense of humility about your own certainties,
a knowledge that what looks like absolute progressive truth in one era does not
always turn out to look that way in hindsight, and a willingness to extend a
presumption of decency and good faith even to people whose ideas you think
history will judge harshly.

Better
to say: “I believe in free debate because I know that my ideas about the good
and right and true might actually be wrong (or at least be only partial truths that miss some
bigger picture), and sometimes even reactionaries are proven right, and we have
to leave the door open to that possibility.”

To be fair, it’s more than over-confidence that causes
people to shut down debate and to try to destroy people who do not think as
they do. The condition more closely resembles a delusional belief. They are
convinced that their opinions are more valid than reality.

If it was really as self-evidently true as they think, they
would not have to force people into assenting to it.

In truth, the zealots who use political correctness to shut
down debate do not believe in the marketplace of ideas or in any other free
market. Seeing themselves as sole possessors of the truth, they believe it
their sacred mission to save humanity from error by forcing everyone to think
as they think.

True enough, they lack humility and many other civic
virtues. But it is also true that they are among the most profoundly bigoted
people around. They are bigoted against anyone who does not think as they
think.

Today they are bigoted against white males because they
blame this group for everything that has gone wrong with the world since the
Garden of Eden. And they are certainly bigoted against any minority group member
or any women who does not toe the party line. In many cases they are also
bigoted against Jews… as in the Boycott Divest Sanction movement.

Wasn’t it Nietzsche who said that the worst conflicts were
over ideology? You cannot know when someone is just echoing your beliefs
because he fears the retribution that will befall him if he doesn’t. You cannot
know whether someone really believes what the politically correct zealots want
him to believe or whether he is just saying so in order to get a good grade.

If you say that white males are disqualified on ethnic,
racial and gender grounds, you are also saying that your own ethnic or racial
or gender identity validates your ideas.

Friday, January 30, 2015

Speaker of the House John Boehner invited Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu to address both houses of the American Congress. He did it
without consulting with the White House.

Undoubtedly, he knew that if he had done so, Obama would
have vetoed the idea.

Given that the president has shown only minimal respect for
Congress or for Israel, Boehner’s action was a political masterstroke.

Presumably, the Obama people were outraged at the breach of
protocol. It’s nice to see that an administration that flouts its ability to
circumvent the Constitution should have discovered the virtue of protocol.

Speaking for the president, unnamed sources said that it was
a slap in the face and that it would undermine America’s relations with Israel
and sabotage the ongoing negotiations with Iran.

The administration did not call Netanyahu “chickenshit”
again, but surely its tantrum was more worthy of a child than of a diplomat.
After all, it could have said that it welcomed the speech but regretted that it
could not meet with the prime minister in person.

That it preferred to heap scorn on the prime minister speaks
volumes.

If you had ever had any doubt about the extent of Obama’s
hatred of Israel and of its prime minister these statements should have
dispelled it. If anyone else had acted this way the world would quickly have
recognized anti-Semitism.

Besides, as has been widely reported Obama political
operatives are in Israel working to defeat the Netanyahu government in the upcoming elections.

To say that the relationship between America and Israel is
going to be damaged by the Netanyahu speech is absurd. The relationship is
already damaged by the work of Barack Obama.

To say that the negotiations with Iran are going to be
undermined fails to recognize that the negotiations are a farce and that Obama’s
“darker purpose” is to find a way for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

The only person who will be damaged by the Netanyahu speech
is Barack Obama. Anyone who opposes the speech is acquiescing to Obama's policy in the Middle East.

Republicans who want to occupy the moral high ground do not
understand that the Democratic Party has never hesitated to undermine the
foreign policy of Republican presidents. The reason is: Democrats understand
politics and many Republicans prefer being holier-than-thou.

Note well: while the Obama administration was excoriating
and cursing the prime minister of Israel, thus revealing its true feelings, its
state department was hosting an Egyptian delegation that included members of
the Muslim Brotherhood.

At a time when the new president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi has declared war on the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist terrorism, thus
being the most important Arab leader to fight the jihadis, Barack Obama decides
that it’s time to show some respect for the outlawed terrorist organization,
the godfather of Hamas.

The
Muslim Brotherhood called for “a long, uncompromising jihad” in Egypt just days
after a delegation of the Islamist group’s key leaders and allies met with the
State Department, according to an official statement released this week.

Just
days after a delegation that included two top Brotherhood leaders was hosted at the State Department, the organization released
an official statement calling on its supporters to “prepare” for jihad,
according to an independent translation of the statement first posted on Tuesday.

The
statement also was issued just two days before a major terror attack Thursday in Egypt’s lawless Sinai
region that killed at least 25.

“It is
incumbent upon everyone to be aware that we are in the process of a new phase,
where we summon what is latent in our strength, where we recall the meanings of
jihad and prepare ourselves, our wives, our sons, our daughters, and whoever
marched on our path to a long, uncompromising jihad, and during this stage we
ask for martyrdom,” it states.

Preparation
for jihad is a key theme of the Brotherhood’s latest call for jihad.

One notes that Obama reserves his venom for Israel. Do you
recall a time when he even spoke ill of the Iranian mullahs, the Palestinian
terrorist organizations or the Islamist extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood?

As of now, Democrat senators have been rallying to support
Obama. They understand that he and they will be the major losers when Netanyahu
speaks before Congress.

Sometimes all you need to know is which side you are on.

[Addendum: Peter Wehner explains the Obama attitude toward
Israel well on the Commentary site. Happily, his views converge with those I
have expressed on this blog:

No
world leader has been treated by President Obama and his administration with
the contempt they have shown Prime Minister Netanyahu–from this
snub in 2010 to being called a
“coward” and “chickens*** prime minister” by senior administration officials.

But the
problem goes much deeper than a personality clash. President Obama is, quite
simply, anti-Israel. In every conceivable situation and circumstance, the
president and his aides give the benefit of the doubt not to Israel but to its
enemies. This despite the fact that Israel is among America’s longest and best
allies, democratic, lawful, takes exquisite steps to prevent civilian deaths
in nations committed to destroying it, and has made extraordinary
sacrifices for peace. No matter; the pressure that’s applied is always applied
most against Israel–even when, as in last year’s conflict with Hamas, Israel
was the victim of lethal attacks.

This is
morally shameful. In a world filled with despotic leaders and sadistic and
ruthless regimes–North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, and
on and on–which nation alone does Mr. Obama become “enraged”
at? Which is the object of his disdain? Which provokes his white-hot anger?

Answer:
Israel. Has it struck you, as it has struck me, that with every other nation,
including the most repressive and anti-American on earth, Mr. Obama is careful
never to give offense, to always extend the olive branch, and to treat their
leaders with unusual deference and respect? Except for the Jewish State of
Israel. It always seems to be in the Obama crosshair….

Perhaps
given President Obama’s history–including his intimate, 20-year relationship
with the anti-Semitic minister Jeremiah Wright–this shouldn’t come as a
surprise. But that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.]

Nick Gillespie makes a good point about the Republican
presidential candidates. He does not say, as others have, that the latest foray
into Iowa looked more like a reality television show than a pre-presidential
primary, but he has identified a serious problem.

Unfortunately, he undermines his own argument by calling certain
prospective candidates: “schmucks.” Whatever their deficiencies as candidates, they
are accomplished professionals in fields outside of politics. They are surely not
schmucks. By insulting them Gillespie makes himself look foolish.

Beginning with the observation that her performance in Iowa
ensured that Sarah Palin will not be a viable candidate, Gillespie goes on to
mix astute analysis with gratuitous insults:

So
America’s most-famous snowbilly [Palin] is out of the running for the 2016
Republican nomination. But what about all the other manifestly unqualified
novices, jackasses, and publicity hounds that surface every four years when the
GOP starts fishing for someone/anyone that can beat whatever sad sack of chum
the Democrats toss in the water?

Unlike
the Democrats, who never stray far from career politicians when selecting a
presidential candidate, Republicans always seem to be looking for some sort of
otherworldly savior to waltz in and take the country by storm. Someone
unsullied by, you know, much (if any) actual experience in holding office,
winning elections, and governing on a daily basis. Though GOP voters typically end
up selecting major-state governors (Reagan, Bush II) or long-serving, partly
mummified senators (Dole, McCain), they spend a hell of a lot time in primary
season dancing with some pretty strange suitors.

Some of the candidates are clearly vanity candidates. But
they are not jackasses. Many are successful businessmen, businesswomen or
professionals. But they are not even remotely qualified to run for the office
of the presidency of the United States. An act of God could not put them in the
White House.

To be fair and balanced, the current Democratic president
brought nothing to the office. He had no experience and no qualifications for
the job. True enough, he was a politician and a United States Senator, but,
beyond that… nothing.

In the meantime vanity candidates are making the Republican Party
look less than serious.

Gillespie writes:

In the
past, Republicans have coalesced around such obvious joke candidates as
businessman Herman Cain, whose main achievements involved management stints at
two of the nation’s most grotesque fast-food chains (Burger King and
Godfather’s Pizza), and Alan Keyes, whose resume includes a brief stint as a
Reagan appointee to the reviled-by-conservatives United Nations, hosting an
ironically titled MSNBC show (Alan
Keyes Is Making Sense), and a historic loss to one Barack Obama in the
2004 Illinois Senate race.

That
Cain and Keyes are black is no accident. While the GOP struggles to crack
double digits in terms of votes from African Americans, the party’s
overwhelmingly white membership seems to have an unending appetite for
high-profile, successful black men whose very presence on a debate stage
softens charges of hostility and indifference to issues about race. This helps
explain why The Weekly Standard is
officially “Taking Ben Carson Seriously,” as Fred Barnes’ recent cover
story puts it.

Herman Cain was a successful businessman. Ben Carson was a
great neurosurgeon. Neither has any business presenting himself as a candidate
for the presidency. If neither man knows any better, then surely Republican
voters should. And Fred Barnes should certainly know that he diminishes the Republican’s
chances for victory when he starts taking Ben Carson seriously
as a presidential candidate.

Gillespie continues:

Unlike
the Democrats, who never stray far from career politicians when selecting a presidential
candidate, Republicans always seem to be looking for some sort of otherworldly
savior to waltz in and take the country by storm. Someone unsullied by, you
know, much (if any) actual experience in holding office, winning elections, and
governing on a daily basis. Though GOP voters typically end up selecting
major-state governors (Reagan, Bush II) or long-serving, partly mummified
senators (Dole, McCain), they spend a hell of a lot time in primary season
dancing with some pretty strange suitors.

It is not quite nice to call Bob Dole and John McCain “mummified,”
but unfortunately, that is the way they appeared to the American public. Surely,
they both had the requisite experience, but both seemed to be largely past
their prime.

For reasons that escape me Gillespie neglects to mention the
last Republican who won the presidency twice, G. W. Bush.

You might think, as I do that Mitt Romney was far more
experienced than Barack Obama. He had more executive experience and more
political experience.

And yet, Gillespie says, he did not seem to have a taste for
governance. Worse yet, he was doomed by the nominating process, process that
did not make the Republican party look very serious. Romney came across as
nasty and negative. He was the last man standing, but he alienated many Republican and independent voters. Surely, Romney did not know how to
run a national political campaign:

Perhaps
it’s the analogue to the longstanding and still-potent jibe that Republicans
don’t really want to govern. They disdain the political process to such a
degree that it takes them forever to pull the switch for a politician. Even the
2012 nominee Mitt Romney was touted more for his supposed business acumen as a
turnaround specialist at Bain Capital than he was for his record as governor of
Massachusetts. I’d argue, too, that Romney’s refusal to stand for reelection as
governor in 2006 mirrored his party’s damaging dislike of politics. If you want
to be president but can’t be bothered to actually learn how to govern, well
good luck with that.

As it happens, beyond Sarah Palin and Ben Carson and Carly
Fiorina and Donald Trump, Republicans have a very good field of candidates:

On the
GOP side, there is a fistful of governors ranging from Chris Christie to Bobby
Jindal to Jeb Bush to Scott Walker. There are young, energetic senators such as
Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, who either have considerable legislative experience
at the state level or have already demonstrated seriousness of purpose by
sponsoring important legislation.

But, if it puts on something that looks more like a reality show
than a nominating process, the Republican party will disrespect voters and
disrespect the country.

Gillespie concludes:

If
history is any guide, Republicans will prevaricate as long as possible and make
goo-goo eyes at candidates who have no meaningful experience and no real shot
at winning the presidency. That’s their right. It’s a free country after all.
But the longer they wait to get serious about vetting their party’s candidates
for president, the more they will lose support among the independent voters
who will decide the 2016 election. And if they lose them, they will only have
themselves to blame, regardless of who the Democrats put up to run.

I hesitate to say it, but Gillespie should find out what the
word “prevaricate” means. It looks like something he fished out of a thesaurus.
And, he should find himself a better editor.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Given our politically correct age and given that the
transgendered are now an oppressed class, it took courage for New York Magazine
to look at the question of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID).

And to treat it as a psychiatric condition, falling
somewhere between a mania and a delusion.

A patient with BIID knows exactly what he wants. He wants to
have one of his healthy limbs amputated. Since he is convinced that his left leg is not
really part of his body, he believes that whoever put it there made a mistake.
He believes that he will never be whole until it has been amputated… above the
knee.

New York Magazine explains:

Rather
than a coherent psychological disorder, BIID is better thought of as a cluster
of conditions, united by the strong sense in a sufferer that a limb, usually a
leg, shouldn’t be attached to their body — a sensation of not “fitting” one’s
body akin to gender dysphoria.

Note well that the condition resembles “gender dysphoria,”
the technical term for those who believe that their true gender identity
differs from their biological gender identity. That is, the transgendered.

It is worth noting that gender dysphoria, like BIID, is a
belief. It is not a scientific fact. And, like BIID, it manifests itself in an extra belief-- that the problem can only be solved by surgery.

A BIID sufferer, quoted in the article, describes his belief
as obsessive.

In his words:

My
biggest problem is a complete secret: I have an unexplainable desire to do
something that most people would dread. I want to have my left leg amputated,
just above the knee. I strongly feel that my left leg just shouldn’t be on my
body. I’ve thought about it obsessively every single day of my life.

The patient describes how his mind relates to his offending
limb:

It’s a
strong feeling that I should have been born without my left leg. If I make eye
contact with it and I’m not fully concentrating on something else, I obsessively
think: This leg shouldn’t be there. And it’s very disturbing
because I know that’s not normal. It’s like my brain perceives my body without
a left leg. I can be talking to someone and suddenly unable to focus on what
they are saying because I’m thinking about my leg and wishing it wasn’t
there. It’s an overwhelming urge. I might be dozing on a recliner and I
get this weird feeling around my knee that that’s where it needs to be off. The busier I am the more I
can control it, but if I get stressed the thoughts intensify.

What triggered the disorder? He explains:

When I
was about 5 or 6. I was in downtown L.A., and since it was just after the war,
there were lots of amputees around. I vividly remember seeing a man get off a
streetcar. He had a peg leg and I thought: I wish that were me. Later, I began to tuck my foot
right up behind my bottom when I was in bed at night — little kids are very
flexible. I’d then place the covers down over my knee so it looked like there
was nothing there.

And he had other experiences that added to the childhood
trauma:

When I
was a kid, a relative’s husband got his hand stuck in a machine and he cut some
of his fingers off. I recall visiting them and they were playing cards with
another couple he’d met through rehab. I shouldn’t even remember any of this
except this other guy had lost his left leg. He was sitting in a chair, wearing
a pair of jeans, and his leg was off above where the cuff of the jeans were so
the cuff was empty.

It
stuck in my mind. It was around the same time I saw the guy with a peg leg.
Later a close male relative who was a race-car driver got in a bad accident and
ended up having his leg amputated.

Was the problem caused by a series of incidents that appeared to be connected?
Did their confluence suggest that someone was trying to tell him something?
Perhaps, but I do not know.

For the record, the man's understanding of the etiology of his condition will not change his condition. It will not persuade him to abandon his other
delusional belief, namely that surgery can solve his problem.

For most of his life this man had kept his condition a
secret. When he told his second wife, he felt some relief, but he saw that she was distressed by the information. He chose to stop talking about it.

He has done online research into those who have undergone
the operation. (You are not surprised to learn that some of these people manage to get the operation done. Some manage to hurt themselves so badly that the operation becomes inevitable.) The results were less than encouraging:

But
there are some people I have exchanged emails with, via an online group. All of
them have had left leg amputations. They still obsess about their limbs and
talk about other amputations even though the leg is gone and they claim to be
much happier. My dream is if I had this leg amputated it would all go away and
I’d be a normal person, with a fake leg. That’s the difference between me and
these other sufferers. Having the leg gone but still being plagued by these
thoughts would make my life worse.

Some people insist that surgery has cured them, but large
numbers of those who have had their left legs removed have discovered that they still suffer from their obsessive cravings.

At a time when it is becoming impossible to discuss gender
dysphoria, and at a time when the strength of an individual’s conviction is an
accepted reason for damaging hormone treatment and gender reassignment surgery, it is helpful to see these obsessions or manias in psychiatric terms, the
better not to make them a human rights issue.

Or to make the transgendered pawns in the culture wars.

In a culture where more than a few people believe that there
is no very significant difference between biological males and biological
females and where people also believe that everyone can choose his or her
gender identity, regardless, using individuals who have serious psychiatric
disorders to advance a cultural agenda is frankly cruel.

Culture warriors seem to want to trot out those who suffer
from gender dysphoria as proof that gender is a social construct, or better,
that it can be corrected surgically.

To them, this condition proves definitively that
biology is not destiny. It proves that we can, with the aid surgery, make
ourselves whatever we want to be.

I would add that we do not know whether all the talk about
the transgendered is causing people to convince themselves that they have the condition
when they do not.

After all, gender dysphoria is an obsessive belief. Since
cultural attitudes impact belief, even to the point of producing waves of
certain psychiatric disorders—like hysteria during the Victorian period—it
might well be that the current glorification of the transgendered is persuading
more people that they have the condition.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Jonathan Chait wants to save liberalism. By extension, he
wants to revitalize the Democratic Party by expunging the rot that seems to
have invaded its core.

Chair knows that the horrors that are being committed in the
name of political correctness are dragging down the Democratic Party. Perhaps
at some point the party was happy to have the support of the radical left, but the situation has gotten out of hand. Democrats lost a lot of
elections a few months ago. If things continue this way, the Democratic Party
might go the way of the Whigs.

Chait does not mention that the American electorate breathed
a new vitality into political correctness by electing Barack Obama to the
presidency.

When Obama became president, political debate was no longer about
ideas. In social media and universities those who
opposed Obama were slandered and defamed.

Let’s not forget that Obama used to pal around with radicals
like William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi. It’s not as though
America elected a good liberal Democrat to the presidency.

Now, with the candidacy of Hillary Clinton looming, the
debate will no longer concern Mrs. Clinton’s thin resume and barely visible accomplishments, but about the
sexism of those who oppose her.

Among other points, Chait echoes an argument that I have occasionally made against the fashionable notion of trigger warnings. The point
bears repeating:

Trigger
warnings aren’t much help in actually overcoming trauma — an analysis by the
Institute of Medicine has found that the best approach is controlled exposure
to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. Indeed, one professor
at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has
noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest
social or ideological slights; she and her fellow faculty members are terrified
of facing accusations of triggering trauma — or, more consequentially,
violating her school’s new sexual-harassment policy — merely by carrying out
the traditional academic work of intellectual exploration. “This is an
environment of fear, believe it or not,” she told me by way of explaining her
request for anonymity. It reminds her of the previous outbreak of political
correctness — “Every other day I say to my friends, ‘How did we get back to
1991?’”

Several columnists have challenged Chait’s idea that
political correctness is antithetical to liberalism. I tend to agree with him
that it belongs on the radical left:

But
political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much
as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of
liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims
turn out to be liberals themselves.

If political correctness is a symptom, of what is it a
symptom? Chait suggests that it is symptom of ignorance and stupidity. Those
who cannot engage with ideas, who cannot participate in political debate resort to calumny, slander and defamation.

After noting that he himself is a white male, Chait despairs
at the fact that the radical left considers his identity to be the only
important point about his ideas.

If you
consider this [my] background and demographic information the very essence of
my point of view, then there’s not much point in reading any further. But this
pointlessness is exactly the point: Political correctness makes debate
irrelevant and frequently impossible.

In many ways this reflects what is called identity
politics. The value of someone’s work, especially in academia and the media
depends more on the person’s racial, ethnic or gender identity than on any
intrinsic merit.

Political correctness is simply the radical version of
identity politics. It refuses to debate ideas, disparages the notion of
intrinsic merit and promotes people who owe their jobs to their identity, not
to what they have achieved.

Breathing
and controlling your breath is one of the easiest ways to improve mental and
physical health, doctors and psychologists say. Slow, deep and consistent
breathing has been shown to have benefits in treating conditions ranging from
migraines and irritable bowel syndrome to anxiety disorders and pain.

“If you
train yourself to breathe a little bit slower it can have long-term health
benefits,” said Murali Doraiswamy, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University
Medical Center in Durham, N.C. Deep breathing activates a relaxation response,
he said, “potentially decreasing inflammation, improving heart health, boosting
your immune system and maybe even improving longevity,”

Breathe more slowly, and breathe from the diaphragm. One
understands that breathing techniques are part of yoga, but now psychologists
are getting into the game:

Belisa
Vranich, a New York City-based clinical psychologist, has been conducting
breathing workshops around the country for just over a year. Among her biggest
clients: corporate managers eager to learn how to better manage stress.

Dr.
Vranich says she instructs clients to breathe with their abdomen. On the
inhale, this encourages the diaphragm to flatten out and the ribs to flare out.
Most of us by instinct breathe vertically, using our chest, shoulders and neck,
she says.

Abdominal,
or diaphragmatic, breathing is often taught in yoga and meditation classes.
Experts say air should be breathed in through the nose, and the exhale should
be longer than the inhale. Dr. Vranich recommends trying to breathe this way
all the time but other experts say it is enough to use the technique during
stressful or tense times or when it is necessary to focus or concentrate.

So, take a deep breath, exhale slowly. It might not cure
everything that ails you. It probably won’t. And yet, it is certainly not going
to hurt you. The possible benefit is largely incommensurate with the effort it
takes to learn this new habit.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Don’t say I
didn’t warn you about the perverse misuse of the concept of empathy.

As I have often mentioned, on this blog and in my book, the
concept of empathy is being promoted as the latest, greatest psychological
panacea.

Therapists believe, as an article of faith, that psychopaths
and sociopaths suffer from a lack of empathy. Obviously, they are happy to
apply this deep thought to the terrorists who are running amok around the world
today.

If only Islamists would learn to feel for the humanity of
their victims they would lay down their suicide bombing vests and join the
family of man.

Thus, terrorists are suffering from emotional disturbances.
We need not fight them; we need not denounce them as evil; we need merely to
cure them. They do not need bombs, they need therapy.

In a recent Daily Beast article, Gil Troy explains what
happens when the therapy culture tries to solve the problem of Islamist
terrorism. Not by denouncing, but by diagnosing. Not by attacking, but by
offering compassion.

As you know, the White House has responded to the terrorist
attacks in France and elsewhere by convening a conference on what it calls “extremism.”

Troy describes the purpose:

To
demonstrate his determination [to fight terrorism], he [Obama] will host a
conference on the subject on Feb. 18. The White House announcement emphasized
that this summit will study strategies for involving “education administrators,
mental health professionals, and religious leaders.”

Happy to pick up a trendy idea, our president confidently
asserts that Islamist radicals—the ones he refuses to call Islamist radicals--need therapy. Their emotional difficulties have been caused by social conditions,
like the rampant injustice that condemns them without trying to understand them.

It’s not new. Well before he entered the White House, Obama thought
in these terms. If I may, the terms resonate well within our own therapy
culture.

Troy exposes what then state senator Obama had to say about
the 9/11 terrorist attacks at the time they happened. First, he offered a diagnosis. Then, he unearthed
the social cause. The remarks are, to say the least, revelatory:

Even
after the 9/11 attacks, some Americans resisted bin Laden’s own framing of the
assaults as Islam versus the West. In Chicago, Obama, then a 40-year-old state
senator, was evacuated from the Thompson Center, the Illinois state government
office building, on that awful day. He watched the horrifying images at his law
firm’s townhouse. “The essence of this tragedy…” he wrote a week later in the Hyde Park Herald, “derives from a
fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to
imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure
of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a
parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular
culture, religion, or ethnicity.” Obama explained that it “most often… grows
out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” Filtering
reality through the therapeutic culture’s gauzy belief system, Obama reduced
Islamism to a psychological shortcoming, while rationalizing a particular form
of violence as a logical, if insensitive, response to poverty and illiteracy.

Obama was analyzing the problem with the terms provided by
the therapy culture. But, this culture did not merely prevent him from understanding the nature of the threat. It also softened and weakened him and us. It has
told us to introspect, the better to cure our own guilt-ridden souls. Once we
have overcome our own problems, the terrorists will have no reason to attack us.

By extension, the 9/11 attacks were a way of punishing a
nation that refuses to accept its own guilt. As Obama’s mentor so eloquently
put it: our chickens came home to roost.

Troy’s remarks resonate with views expressed on this blog:

Beyond
insulting billions of poor people who never turned violent, Obama’s 2001
reaction raises questions about whether America’s I’m-Ok-You’re OK
overly-psychological culture can handle Islamism’s I’m-Ok-Die-Infidel! death
cult. Our pluck, our grit, our occasional righteous anger, our absolute sense
of right and wrong, has been counseled out of millions of us. One 2013 survey estimated that a third of Americans have sought
“professional counseling for mental health issues.” Some estimates run as high
as eighty percent of Americans having received some form of psychological
counseling during their lifetimes.

Overall,
the therapeutic focus on the neurotic self often undermines social solidarity
and relativizes perceptions. While the resulting therapeutic culture is more
tolerant, forgiving, and sensitive to others, it is also more guilt-ridden,
apologetic, and self-loathing. Reinforced by the post-1960s Great
American—and Western—Guilt Trip, which emphasizes our own society’s flaws while
excusing our enemies’ sins, the fight against absolutist, totalitarian ideologies
like Islamism starts looking doomed. We see the results in ++politically
correct college campuseswhere students accept someone waving the ISIS flag but denounce waving the Israeli flag. We see it in an identity
politics that allows narratives of victimization to trump traditional liberal
commitments to free speech….

Ideological
combat requires clear-seeing warriors who distinguish good from evil, not
mealy-mouthed social workers who believe everyone and every idea is good.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Those who have read my book, The Last Psychoanalystmight recall that I called psychoanalysis “overpriced
storytelling.”

Thus, I am naturally intrigued by the story of Jay Neugeboren’s psychoanalysis, as he recounted in The New York Times. You see,
Neugeboren is a writer. If nothing else, he was in psychoanalysis for the
story.

For the record, Neugeboren does not call his therapy
psychoanalysis, but since his therapist, Dr. Jean Franklin was sitting behind
him and not saying much of anything, I believe I am labeling it correctly.

As Neugeboren describes her technique and tells us what he learned from it:

Dr.
Franklin rarely commented on the stream of stories, memories and feelings that
poured from me, instead guiding me to understand feelings, present and past,
largely on my own. In my last month on the couch, pleased to realize I’d
actually come to like myself, and thinking of ways I’d changed — my ability to
be sad and to sit inside my sadness; feeling capable of loving and being loved;
trusting, increasingly, my feelings and my
imagination, however strange, mad and mysterious they seemed — I said that I
thought I had, in the rooms of my mind, succeeded in opening a few doors and
windows, in making some small changes.

Of course, Franklin was giving her patient the silent
treatment. She helped him to manufacture a ton of stories, and even convinced
him that those stories had been hidden in his mind.

This continued, off and on, for more than fourteen years.

Neugeboren had first consulted a therapist when he had a
frightening experience.

He explained:

On the
day, some decades ago, that I sent off the manuscript of what would become my
sixth published book, I was suddenly possessed — there is no other word — by
the desire to leave this world, and to do so by stepping in front of an
oncoming bus. I walked to the edge of the sidewalk, stepped down, hesitated,
let the bus go by, and decided to go home, where, if one of my children, then
ages 4, 2 and 1, defied me in any way, I imagined picking that child up and
throwing the child against a wall or through a window.

One understands why he sought help. As it happened, he was
able to solve the problem in a matter of weeks. He did so well that Dr.
Franklin prescribed psychoanalysis.

At the moment he started thinking of throwing himself under a
bus, his life was going well:

... at
the age of 37, I had a life better than any I’d ever believed possible. I had
published five books (after having written, by the age of 27, eight unpublished books); I was married;
and I had three delightful, healthy children. I had not, like my father, been a
failure, and had not, like my younger brother, Robert, gone mad and been
institutionalized.

After a few weeks of therapy, Neugeboren undertook six years
of analysis, three times a week. He got completely into his mind and produced
reams of material for his silent analyst. And he seems to have been happy with
the experience.

And yet, we are within our rights to ask about the outcome
of his adventure.

Unfortunately, a couple of years after his first six year
foray, his life fell apart:

But I
stayed on, three times a week, for the next six years. And when, two years
after that, my family fell apart and I became single parent to my three
children, I returned and stayed on, twice a week, for eight years.

It would perhaps have been more accurate to say that his
marriage fell apart. He would have done better to mention his wife.
His account erases her from the story.

You might believe that Neugeboren got so completely lost in
his mind that he checked out of his marriage. Then again, the reasons his marriage
failed might have had nothing to do with his years of psychoanalytic self-involvement
or with his transference relationship with his analyst.

One notes, in reading his account, that he had developed a
very good, albeit apparently unanalyzed transference to Dr. Franklin.

Witness his remark about his relationship with her:

I
approached therapy sessions with the same energy, intensity and sheer
playfulness I brought to my writing: I brought in journal entries, letters,
books, photographs, my typewriter, my baseball glove and drafts of works in
progress. So large was my desire for my doctor to know me that I once appeared
at her door with that day’s show-and-tell piled high in one of my children’s toy
wheelbarrows.

Anyway, as happens in psychoanalysis, and as I explained
clearly in my book, Neugeboren dealt with his failed marriage and his failed psychoanalysis by signing up for eight more years of
psychoanalysis.

Naturally, he wants us to believe that he gained
extraordinary insights from treatment. When you have invested as much as he
did, you had better think that the insights are mind-altering.

Insight notwithstanding, Neugeboren was, by his testimony,
making himself into a fictional character.

In his words:

I gave
myself up to my own life and feelings in the same way that, when inventing
characters, I gave myself up to what my characters felt and experienced. By
imagining an experience back into existence I came closer not only to what had
happened and what I’d felt, but to what I’d forgotten, or had not felt, or not
seen, or might have felt. I became lost and frightened the way characters in my
novels became lost and frightened, and I found ways of surviving in ways my
characters did. Like my writing, psychotherapy enabled me to make sense of a
world that often seemed senseless.

Making yourself into a fictional character does provide
something like a meaning to your life. But it is a fabrication, something that
will alienate you from other people and their real world problems.

While you are getting lost in your mind, they are living
their lives. And they are expecting that you will be there for them and will
uphold your responsibilities as a member of the family.

Thus, I note that Neugeboren manifests a tendency that I
identified as central to the Freudian project: to make you into a fictional
character living in a fictional world.

By his own account, Neugeboren’s treatment helped him to
open up of a few small windows in his mind. When he called them “small changes,”
his ever-helpful analyst corrected him and declared that they seemed “pretty
large” to her.

He seems to think this was momentous, but in the world of
storytelling, this is not a very good ending.

One notes that when your analyst remains silent for the
greater part of your time the few words that she deigns to offer you will sound
oracular.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Gretchen Rubin explains that changing a habit changes our identity. We are loath to become someone else, even if it means having better habits. It’s one thing to change what you are doing; quite
another to change who you are.

If virtue, as Aristotle suggested, involves practicing good
habits, the more you practice such habits, the more others will accustom
themselves to the new virtuous You.

It is not, Rubin suggests, an automatic transformation.
Becoming someone else does not happen overnight.

Rubin explains her thought:

Our
idea of “this is the kind of person I am” is so bound up in our habits and
actions that it can be hard to see. But our sense of identity can make it
easier or harder to change a habit.

Often,
habits can’t change until identity changes.
For instance, a person identifies as the fun one, the one who says “yes” to
everything — but also wants to cut back on drinking. A person identifies as a
workaholic, but then wants to work reasonable hours. The identity is
incompatible with the change in habits.

James
Agee liked to drink and smoke, certainly — but he also considered himself that kind of person. So to change his
habits, he had both to stop drinking and smoking, and also “learn to be the
kind of person he was not.” But, he wrote, he detests that kind of person! No wonder it was hard for him
to change. Change meant fundamentally altering himself to become the kind of
person he’d always detested.

Continuing, Rubin suggests that one must change one’s
identity before one can change a habit. Agee, however, in the passage she
quotes, says that changing the habit came before he learned to be someone else.

She also suggests that we can only change our identity by
rewriting our story. Some researchers have recommended the exercise in order to transform ourselves, as Augustine did, from sinner
into saint, but most people, I believe, use the exercise to buck up their courage and to continue developing new habits before the benefits become manifest.

Rubin raises several important questions.

I would address them by noting, after Aristotle, that you
can only overcome bad habits by replacing them with good habits. Considering that
you identify yourself with your habits, you can only develop a new habit by
working at it, by struggling against a tendency to retain the familiar bad
habits.

Yet, if you try to change your identity before you change
your habits, you will fail. Many psychotherapists have proposed that changing a
habit requires some kind of prior mental change. The results have invariably
been that you change your mind but keep your habits.

It should go without saying, but no
one has changed a bad habit by discovering its meaning.

The reason is clear. You are not merely who you think you
are. You are not merely who you feel you are. Your identity is based on what
you do and on how other people see you.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, you are the only one who
can never see your face directly.

If you change a bad habit, other people
will for a time still identify you as the person who presented himself with the
bad habit. You might decide to clean up your life, but other people will treat
you as the person who, for example, drinks and smokes to excess… the life of
the party.

If you are the life of the party you will probably receive
more than your share of invitations to fun parties. But you will not be hired
to do a job and your friends will not want to fix you up with their sisters.

When you abandon a bad habit, those who have known you by
your bad habit will resist, even distrust the new You. Only consistently good behavior will persuade people to treat you
as someone they can trust and rely on.

The more time this takes, the more you might feel
discouraged when people do not catch on. The more you feel discouraged the less
you will feel that it is all worth the effort.

It has less to do with self-perception than with the way
other people see you and the way they treat you.

In time, your good behavior will become so automatic, so
second nature that you will feel that it really is You. Eventually, other people
will recalibrate their expectations about you, act differently toward you,
introduce you to their sisters and solicit your views on weighty matters.

Put it all together and you will become a new You. If this
involves a radical change of identity I think it fair to say that you will have
become someone else.

I suspect that you eventually reach what Malcolm Gladwell called a
tipping point, where the new habit feels natural and where other people accept
it as You.

If I had to venture a guess, I would imagine that the
influence of other people is more important than your self-awareness.

One should also to recognize that, among your friends,
family and colleagues, some people will more quickly accept the new You while
others will remain skeptical.

Evidently, you should put greater stock in the actions of
those who trust you than in the derision of those who do not. Thereby, you will
build confidence and identify with your new virtuous You.

I close with a few lines from Aristotle. Therein the philosopher
argued that you are what you do. You cannot be a builder unless you build
something. And you cannot be courageous unless you act courageously.

One might see in this text the foundation of cognitive
therapy:

This,
then, is the case with the virtues also; by doing the acts
that we do in our transactions with other men we become
just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the
presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appetites and feelings of anger; some men become temperate and good-tempered, others
self-indulgent and irascible, by behaving in one way or the
other in the appropriate circumstances. Thus, in one word,
states of character arise out of like activities. This is
why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states of character correspond to the differences between
these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form
habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it
makes a very great difference, or rather all the
difference.